Today I will be using a flick over and pull with a final kick with the left knee tap.
We were up and out by 11 am. Had breakfast and then off to explore San Francisco. We walked from the motel down to the shore of San Francisco bay and then followed it round to a tourist spot called Fisherman’s Wharf. On the way we had a good view of Alcatraz out in the bay and there was the famous Golden Gate Bridge. The walk around the bay was very pleasant. San Francisco is a very pretty and interesting city with more older buildings than we’d seen to date, it also had this vibrancy about it.
Fisherman’s Wharf is a very busy tourist spot consisting of souvenir shops, camera shops and the largest number of seafood establishments I’d ever seen in such a small area. They ranged form proper restaurants to cafes to little stalls all selling shellfish raw or cooked. We spent a couple of hours here wandering in and out of the shops and generally enjoying the sights. There was a middle-aged black man sitting on the floor in the street leaning back against a waste bin and he was holding a large bushy tree branch in front of him. This meant that he couldn’t actually be seen by people walking along towards him. All they could see, if they actually noticed anything at all, was a lot of foliage. He waited until somebody was close enough and then he’d move his branch out of the way and shout “Boo” at them. More often than not the passer-by nearly had a heart attack, jumped two feet in the air and wandered on laughing embarrassingly. The man with the bush laughed himself silly every time he did it, he collapsed into a fit of the giggles and then got himself ready to do it all again. During all this there was a large crowd of people on the opposite side of the road just standing about and watching the fun.
This man was not doing it for money. He seemed to just be doing it for his own and our amusement.
The only shops more plentiful than souvenir and food shops are camera and electrical shops and every time I passed one the owner would rush out and say things like, “That’s a nice camcorder you got there. Hey, where ya from? I’ve got just the thing for that camera.” I’d say, “I don’t want anything for this camera.” And they’d say, “I’ve got something that’ll make all the difference, how about a filter?”
This happened time and time again. I was offered filters, tri-pods, lenses, cases, anything to make a sale and what with the souvenir shop owners trying to flog you T-shirts every five minutes the novelty of the place was rapidly beginning to wear off. Plus the fact that wherever we went every shop seemed to be run by Asians or Chinese and they couldn’t seem to speak much English at all. Come to America and nobody speaks a bloody word of English half the time. Still, this part of San Francisco was unashamedly rip-off tourist city and at least you knew where you stood. Once we left this area the city had character, old and ornate buildings and a very laid back atmosphere.
We wanted to take one of the famous trolley-cars on a ride around the town and made for the nearest pick-up point not far from where we were in Fisherman’s Wharf. In fact Fisherman’s Wharf was a terminal for the trolley-cars and seemed to attract all the tourists for miles around. There were horrendous queues, people jostling around and there seemed to be a wait of at least an hour to board a trolley. Taking advantage of all this were two blokes who each had one of those really long stretched limos parked in the road and who were hustling for customers. They would take people on a tour of the city for a few dollars more than the price of the trolley but the trouble was they had to get their full complement of passengers before they could drive off.
One of these drivers was a bit of a cool dude, sharply dressed, shades and with a walk straight out of Saturday Night Fever. “I need two more passengers before we can go, two more passengers,” he shouted as he coolly moved through the crowds. “Two more passengers, two more pas–oh-sengers,” as he tripped up a step, shrugged his shoulders Del-boy fashion, adjusted his shades which had slipped down his nose and tried to regain his coolness. The crowds by now were swarming about everywhere. He’d just regained his cool when he said, “Two more passengers, I need two more pass- Aaaaaaaaargh!!” We watched as a woman pushing a wheelchair ran right over his foot. He hopped up and down. “Aaaaaaaaaaaargh! Aaaaaaaaaargh! Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Then silence……….and then………”Two more passengers,” he said in a subdued and pathetic little voice, “Two more passengers,” as he hobbled up and down. Emma and I were in hysterics and I’m sure I saw a tear in the poor bloke’s eye. From a groovy, smooth talking, laid back dude to a mumbling, shambling wreck in minutes. It can happen to the best of us.
It was becoming obvious that we weren’t going to get on a trolley very easily so we decided to walk up to a bus stop and get the bus to Chinatown. Although we asked the bus driver to tell us when we got there it was a silly thing to ask really because it was pretty obvious when we got there. Funnily enough there were throngs of Chinese and nothing but Chinese shops and signs. “I think we might be there,” I said unnecessarily to Pauline. We got off the bus and it was like getting off a boat and stepping into a powerfully moving river. As our feet touched the ground the sheer force of the crowds of Chinese literally dragged us along, we couldn’t stop, we had to keep going. We seemed to be in the market area, rows upon rows of food shops, grocers, butchers, bakers and fishmongers. It seemed to be mostly butchers shops and there were strange dead skinless animals hanging in the windows, fishmongers with peculiar sloppy looking stuff in black plastic bins, people behind counters chopping bits off dead animals and people wrapping up bloody body bits in newspaper. The hygiene inspector would have had a field day here and all this time we were being pushed along with the tide of people until suddenly the market shops ended and everything calmed down. We had some space, not much but we could breathe again.
We managed the rest of Chinatown at a more leisurely pace until we wandered out of it as suddenly as we’d arrived. We kept seeing the trolleys passing us up and down the road and decided that we’d try and get one, but where were the trolley stops? While Pauline, Emma and Sophia were trying to find a toilet (something that happened on a regular basis), I stood on a corner and watched the world go by. Then a trolley car appeared and stopped on its tracks slap-bang in the middle of a crossroads. People piled on and off, it set off again and stopped bang in the middle of the next crossroads a few hundred yards down the street. It seemed that in addition to regular trolley stop points it would also stop at every crossroads so when Pauline came back I said, “Look, all we have to do is get on the trolley car when it stops in the middle of the road over there.” Pauline wasn’t so sure about it but I said I’d seen everyone else doing it so it would be all right.
The trouble was that although the trolley stopped at each crossroads none of the other traffic did so you had to take your life in your hands to get to the trolley before you got run over. We managed this but when we reached the trolley it was so crowded the conductor told us to stand on the outside running boards. The trolley cars are all open and the conductor was positioning us along these very narrow ledges fixed along the outside of the car. And there we were, standing on the ledge, holding onto an upright pole for dear life as the trolley car clanged and clanked along the tram tracks to the next intersection. Some people got off and thankfully Pauline, Emma and Sophia were able to sit down inside the car but I had to stay on the ledge outside hanging on with a camcorder and camera slung over one shoulder and a plastic bag of souvenirs in the other hand. Traffic was roaring past me inches away and because the ledges were quite close to the ground the cameras over my shoulder were swinging around inches from the car rooftops. At one point I had to quickly move out of the way before getting skewered by a car aerial. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the San Franciscan’s motor insurance has a clause covering them for getting their aerials stuck up people’s bums. At another point in the journey there were some road work barriers in the middle of the road and again I had to move out of the way to stop myself being knocked silly by them.
It was an experience I’ll never forget and nothing like Judy Garland’s famous song and dance routine ‘The Trolley Song’.
We got off at the top of Nob Hill which in the old days was the millionaire’s area of the city and it still had some imposing houses in what appeared to be quite a select part of town. On the way back we got another trolley that took us right back to Fisherman’s Wharf and from there we took a bus back to within a few blocks of our motel.
A busy and quite hair-raising day in places. Went to bed and dreamt I fell off a trolley onto a car aerial and with the aerial up my bum I fluttered around like a pennant until I ended up in New York.
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